EVE is a science fiction universe created by the Icelandic game developer CCP and populated by privateer space ship captains who flit around the dusky heavens trading items, mining asteroids and shooting each other – usually for profit, fame, revenge, or just to pass the time of day. Most of the captains are in corporations and a lot of the corporations are in alliances, and sometimes big wars happen between these groups and lots of pilots lose their lives before acquiring new ones thanks to horribly expensive cloning technology. But it’s OK because it’s all just pretend.

Set far, far, far into the future, in a place called New Eden, EVE is a little different to most sci-fi realms, in the sense that whilst there are lots of spaceships, lasers, and robots (called drones) buzzing about, there aren’t any aliens keen on enslaving humanity (none that have made themselves known at any rate). In any case humanity has always done a far better job of enslaving itself anyway, so it was decided to not bother so much with green-tentacled beings from Dimension X, and instead have humans doing the nasty on its own. To that end there are five civilizations dotted around the New Eden star cluster, all human to a greater or lesser degree, just a bit distant from Earth is all.

The five races that cohabit New Eden are the Caldari, Gallente, Amarr, Minmatar and Jove. The Jove are very clever and keep to their own side of the galaxy and rarely bother anyone, but the other four are busy amongst themselves waging war, making up again and basically doing all they can to keep their populations in line. Although the four main civilizations are effectively identical in ability and potential, they do have interesting histories — the bulk of which barely tickles most of EVE’s pilots because they have their own wars to fight far away from national borders out in so-called “0.0” space.